webwrangling and WordPress

Coming soon: WordPress 3.0

The Big New Upgrade is now in Beta-1 testing. I’m going to be installing the beta on a test blog next week (school holidays really cut into hackfest time) and seeing how it plays. Of course, they may well be up to Beta-2 testing by then.

The new features to look forward to:

WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user) have merged, so that multiple blogs will be easy to run from a single install. So far this is not yet an automated process, but the idea is that once 3.0 is in general release this will be easy-peasy to manage. This should make it especially easy to integrate custom social networks around a WordPress install while still having an uncluttered main blog as the front page.

Custom menus are going to be available. I’m curious to see just how many options are configurable here.

Custom post types – this will essentially add a more Tumblr-like posting facility right out of the box, and should allow lots more options for theme designers with regard to both styling each post type and adding new post-types via functions.php. It’s also going to make it a lot easier for website producers to teach clients how to post their own content optimally-formatted with these options built-in – custom fields should now be incorporated into an intuitive menu for each post type instead of being a more complicated add-on option.

I’d be most interested to hear from anybody playing around with the Betas.